User blog:Azyle00/Patch Update, Mar 14, 2012 - v.1.7.0 - Changes and My Thoughts
Finally an Update! 'My Thoughts and Predictions etc - March 14, 2012' (The following is merely desires and predictions about today's patch, not what really changed) Yes word just went out by notice to all players than in less than 2 hours from now, the Little Empire that we know and love is going to get hit with the patchstick. What will this mean for us all? Well I would not expect much because in the past the game updates have focused on bug fixes and such. Now while there are still bugs to be sorted out like Fury Armor mismatching to slots and name and certainly the ranking system is completely messed up, other than that, there are not that many glaring bugs to be known. Now yes, they could fix the bad grammar and spelling mistakes in the item and spell descriptions (be happy to fix them all for you Old Camel for 500 Mojo!), but those do not effect the game as much as just make the game developers English skills or education level highly suspect. So in effect what would I hope to see in a patch that seems to promise a "new Little Empire"? *Bug fixes. In particular, the bug that is "Fury Armor" which I have cited in other places describing the issue. It is merely a mismatching problem and should be fixed. *Unit balancing. I do not expect any of the Units to be changed honestly, but I feel there are some balance issues with the units. Not in respect to power and so on as there really is not a single useless unit, but there are some that could use a minor tweak to make them more valid. In particular: ** Priest is far too underpowered, being slightly ineffective enough to really be used at lower levels the majority of the time and utterly useless at high levels because they simply die to fast. Give the guy a boost to his healing and another 100 HP overall, and I think he would make sense. **Knight is a silly front line unit, dieing too easily and costing too much to ever replace the cheaper Front line units. Perhaps this was the intent, but to me he is supposed to be a replacement for FT combo and therefore should be able to handle himself better at the front line. And given that Front Line units die and get churned out, he needs a far lower build time, perhaps even as low as Trolls. **Trolls are too overpowered in many ways for how fast they can be churned out. As a reversal to the Knight needing a far quicker build time, Trolls need to take longer to build. *New Buildings, Units, Equipment, Spells and Rings. Yes the game in expanding and while we saw the level cap increase from 30 to 35, we saw nothing new at all, meaning from level 25 to 35 there is not a single new unit, building or piece of equipment available. The upper game needs expanding as the levels get increased. Do the lower levels need more units? I do not think so. The game is pretty well balanced at lower levels and adding anything would just throw that off. And adding more non-End Game pieces of equipment and Spells just is another way to sucker players into spending their Mojo incorrectly. *Equipment, Spells and Rings for Gold, Crystal at lower levels. I would really like to see them ease up on the demands of the game to push leveling players to spend $$$ and Mojo on mid game spells and equipment. As my articles have shown, it is already next to impossible to compete at the End Game without buying Mojo as most players would only be able to save 1000 Mojo by level 30 and had a very hard life doing this. As I write more and more articles about not spending Mojo this way, less and less players are going to do it. You simply need to get to level 25 grinding it out and then buy 4000 Mojo for $99.99 and buy all the End Game spells and equipment you need and move on. I understand selling Mojo is a revenue stream used by Camel Games to finance their game etc, but it is abused and overpriced. i think spending $$$ on Mojo should be a way to fast track your game and fast track your End Game but not be the ONLY way other than spending up to a year struggling to compete at the High Levels. If players could either buy mid game equipment with Gold, Crystal OR Mojo, I think the situation would be far better. In fact, I think Mojo should be able to be purchased with Gold and Crystal as well as with $$$. Yes the price could be super high, but at least doing so would allow the curve to be a little less apparent. *Wheel of Mojo changed. It should be changed because it is fixed. It is not a true spinning wheel at all and therefore it is just a silly little game. Just let us click on a treasure chest and move on. Also the drop rate of upper end equipment and Mojo should be adjusted. One way or another, your game is flawed and I imagine you lose more players who realize this "cash grab" you are engaging in that you would keep as customers if you would be more fair with the Mojo gifts. It is sad in this sense that the game is so much fun and engaging but at the same time, seems to reek of developer greed. *Hourglass Fanatic Quest etc. This is possibly the most retarded quest in the Daily Quests as it KILLS your chance that day when it is one of your Quests. I would seriously like to think that the Daily Quests could be completed each day by a player and get his free 2 Mojo. It is not a lot of Mojo and takes some work. Throwing that in our faces and taking away any chance to complete our Daily Quests for Mojo profit really stings, I chalk that one up to Developer Greed as well. *Increase the Friends List size. Introduce Guilds, Clans etc. It would be nice to see Friends list size grow bigger and I am hoping this happens soon. It would be even nicer to see a guild system formed within the game. *More incentive for "holding" a Player's Castle. Right now, as most learn quite quickly, it simply is not worth holding a Player's Castle hostage for the Tax and "Punish" for resources. Given that typically another player, who is often higher level than you, helps the friend in question and wipes all your units out, you simply should Retreat from that Castle as soon as you take it over. The Reward for merely Occupying a Castle is staggering depending on how much resources the player has on hand. Then to Tax them for such a little tiny amount and make them mine Gold or Crystal at that hourly rate is absurd. I do not think the mechanic was intended for us to attack and leave and certainly "Trolling" (sending 1 unit over and over to many different Castles, hoping they are "open") has become an epidemic in the game. It would be great for this part of the game to see some changes and attention to make it viable and be used as it was intended....for PVP warfare. *Arena "Passive" Lineup. Really wish we had some control over our Arena Lineup. I hate thinking I take a loss in the Arena because I am attacked and the game system gets to decide how to place my units. This is quite garbage really. We should be able to set up our Arena Lineup so players who attack us their get to fight our true game, not something the system has decided. Because your Lineups suck...period. *During Arena battles units drop gold...So how come they can't drop Crystal and sometimes Mojo? One aspect for rewarding the Arena player and as a further incentive for fighting and killing more units would be there was a chance they might drop a Mojo instead of a Gold. This is another way you could fix this Mojo imbalance you have in your game to make it a little more fair to the player base and a little less greedy for you. *Location Based Attacks. Face it, this system is kinda stupid. You pretty much have all the USA players attacking each other, all the Chinese players attacking each other, all the Russian Players attacking each other etc. It was a good idea on paper, but you have divided the game up into countries and it actually serves no purpose. Just make it 10 minutes to attack another player worldwide. Either that or allow us to "move" our troops to another area, spending the time to travel there and then we can attack from that location within the time frame, so I can move my Troops from China to the USA and get revenge for all my USA friends on their Rivals list because right now, losing my Hero for 2 hours is just not feasible. Would love to see this system change because it has absolutely no bearing on the game whatsoever and whatever the intention originally was for it, it is not working. *Allow players to have a second Hero or second account "easier". A lot of us would love to try all 3 Heroes and this really seems to be something that could only help the game itself as more Heroes = more Mojo we may buy. 'What the Patch Actually Brought Us' (The following is a list of things that changed in this patch and my thoughts about the changes) Patch Notes or lack thereof are listed on the Market for Little Empire and read as follows: Joint alliance with assistant attack, strengthen your fighting force exponentially! Friend coalition with multi defence, make your castle impregnable! Here comes the domineering debut of fort city, double hero double dreams! The latest version has mixed up with new elements of fort city, alliance attack and multi-defence on the basis of the game originals, adding increasingly strategic and tactical war experience. *'Enemy Hero HP can now be seen during Battles as a Bar above his head.' *'More "slices" added to the Wheel of Mojo, now 15 slices.' *'Minor layout and display changes.' *'Hero HP bar now has numbers.' *'New Building: Portal added, Cost: 500,000 Gold and 100,000 Crystal. It's available at level 24. It allows you to enter the Snow World, creating a new Hero and a new Empire that is linked to your existing Empire. Your friends can access the new Empire to "help" you by clicking on the Portal in your old land.' *'Cap to Looting. Now once a player's resources get too low, the player attacking him will receive ZERO Gold and Crystal as looted resources. What this cut off is exactly is not known. I have not managed to score any loot "trolling" players tonight and have tried over 20 times.' *'The new portal, which allows you to make a second Hero who lives in your Fort in Winter Land, is a line of defense for you essentially you can now use this Fort as another means to guard against attacks from other players. You can "assist defend" yourself in a sense.' *'Fury Armor set was kinda fixed. Now the Names are correct for the image and the slot that they are worn in, but the effects of Wristbands, Spaulders and Armor are still mixed up. So you can still get 4% more Shorten Spell Cool Down Time by wearing Tier 2 Armor instead of Tier 4 allowing Behemoth a grand total of 71%' 'The Good, The Bad and The Patch...' So the patch came in and surprised many people. I expected a fix to Fury Armor bug but certainly did not expect them to simply rename the items and leave the stats mismatched. Therefore Behemoth can still get the extra Shorten Spell Cool Down Time by choosing to wear Tier 2 Body piece. I think it also means he can get a higher than normal Crit or Attack speed rate this way to but have not fully done the math on that yet. I anticipated the introduction of additional accounts or Heroes to some degree and was correct on this, but never expected them to take it in the direction they did. I anticipated a "fix" to Mojo generating capability as well as I knew that the desire by the players to have a second Hero and the desire by the Developers to let them have a second Hero would push this to occur. The Developers have a vested interest in allowing high level power players access to a second Hero, simply because it will mean not only a second Hero for them to buy Mojo ($$$) to End Game gear their second Hero and Kingdom, but the race to be first and ahead of the pack is huge among competitive players, therefore those players in their race to level the second Hero will also stop at nothing in gearing their Hero with selective items and spells that are not End Game, but will allow them to level at maximum speed. It is a good thing the Store has an unlimited supply of Air Bash and Voodoo Strike, as these will be two of the most sought after "pay $ to level" spells for the power players. Hourglass Fanatic type Daily Quests was something I complained about quite a bit and we have seen a change to it. I do not know to what degree, but so far I have only seen "Hourglass User" as a Daily Quest myself and it has been adjusted from "speed up 2 times", to "speed up 1 time". Also, "Firefighting" was added as a Daily Quest so this will dilute how often Hourglass User comes up. I am still pushing for complete removal of the Hourglass Quests as I think they are just a complete slap in the player's face by an already overly greedy company. The ability to generate Mojo to gear up your Hero has already been debunked by me in my Mojo article. At times when I read it over, I even feel I estimate the ability to make an average amount of Mojo at 25 per day at higher levels to be perhaps a little high. Honestly, prior to the patch, I began to feel that 20 per day was more realistic, and this pushes the ability to gear up at the End Game past a full year of solid play, something I find completely alarming as it simply is a statement from Camel Games that if you do not buy Mojo for $$$, do not expect to be able to compete. However, with the addition of the second Hero at level 24, you have your Mojo making ability take a huge spike upwards. In fact it doubles. Yes doubles. You get to do 90% of all the Quests again, all of which give Mojo rewards. Furthermore, you have the ability to now generate double the number of Wheel of Mojo spins per day. So your ability to make Mojo effectively has increased to double your old capacity. Power players will now be making 40-50 Mojo per day on average. Because you are gearing up at twice the speed, you will increase your power on one Hero, your main most likely, and be able to actually win more and more Arena battles daily as you go along. This means that unlike when you were not geared up and had to lose or avoid 25% to 40% of your Arena battles at higher levels, you now can get to the win 95% level fairly soon. Again, with the right units and proper gear, because you are the attacked in the Arena, there is not a single lineup any player can present to you that you cannot beat. I have written an entire article on how to do this and that data still stands post patch. What this means however, is that you also now have a second Hero to gear out. Which opens up a new problem to the budget player, who should I gear up first? Well in my opinion, you need to stick with the first Hero until he is winning all his battles daily past level 30. And unless you are buying Mojo for $$$, you need to still save your mojo for End Game gear even moreso than before and not spend it trying to level faster. There is still no reason to be high level when it comes to Mojo generating. Your focus should be making Mojo, getting wheel spins, not worry about rank or level. The game only gets harder past level 24 when you are undergeared. The new dynamic they have introduced of the "Fort" excites me. Not that I think the system is overly good, I do not, but it shows they are taking the game forward and to new levels. The problem with Camel Games is they are not reinvesting in their game as far as "talent" goes. They are making great money from the Mojo sales, there is no doubt in my mind, but apparently are not even willing to spend some of that $$$ on an English proof reader (I am available). To roll out a patch that A) does not fix the grammar and spelling errors already in the game and B) has a brand new slick looking interface, but has more typos and terrible grammar in every new piece of written English introduced, is simply absurd. I know perhaps they are eyeing a new G6 Jet to purchase but really guys, Microsoft WORD could have caught most of the spelling errors and certainly helped your grammar as well. God I nearly sprayed my coffee all over the place when I read the text for the new Fort Formation Quest. Are you serious?!?! You even spelled "Formation" wrong. And to spell "Soldier" incorrectly... Anyhow, enough about that, I digress... The game is going in the right direction...expand and introduce new ideas. The Fort system now adds that ability we wanted, how our "Friends" who are spread out all over the world can actually feel like they are able to "play" in the PVP with us. Now you can be in China, like I am and attack Koreans, like I do and get your Canadian buddies, which I have, and they can assist you in that attack and not suffer that 2 hour travel time. Although I still would like the whole LBS system to be removed or changed somehow, I do see how it prevents guilds and clans from coordinating worldwide attacks using the Hammer of the Gods method on anyone they feel like, but it does not actually stop this effort and why would we want to? We should be supporting Clans and Guilds in Little Empire as this adds a more interesting dynamic to the game overall and has been a successful element in so many past MMORPGs. How about a 2 player Arena? Would that be so hard to add? I do not think so. The mechanic for the assist is already in place. Players are bots in the Arena. simply makes those bots "assist" each other. I have hope for more dynamic PVP features going forward simply because they have made the "fort" system and introduced it to us. While I do not think it is exactly a very good implementation, it is a step in the right direction and time will tell if it makes sense in its current form. Mojo! I have cited before the Mojo rate is too harsh. The wheel is rigged (and still is) and that they need to lighten up on players and let the Mojo flow more freely. Now this is not confirmed but based on my win Mojo rate since the patch, either I am having very good luck or they have increased it. Overall as well. I am finding more drops from the Sky that are Mojo (3 in 8 hours, usually 1 every day or two) and my success rate is above average and staying there since the patch for winning Mojo on the wheel. This will take a long time for me to calculate and come up with a new percent rate for it, but whereas I nailed the win rate on the wheel to 10% (1 Mojo average over 10 spins), I could see it being as high as 15% now. And as I said before, you have the capacity to make twice as much Mojo per day as before. In fact, keeping pace with 2 Heros on a daily basis is a lot of play time now, power players will be very busy doing this. If I was Level 35, I think I would be happy I do not have to race to 40 and level a new Hero at the same time. They did not expand the End Game. They did not add new Quests for high levels. They did not add New Units, equipment etc. Well, perhaps it is in the works and rather than delay the patch to wait for additional features, they rolled this out now and we will see these things down the road. Besides, given we have a new Hero to level up, did we really want to worry about leveling our old one to 40 and spending Mojo on the new Hero and new high level equipment etc? I do not think so. One thing at a time. Even if they had new content prepared, given the New Hero and Fort being added, they would be best to wait and introduce other new aspects later anyhow. No need to rock the boat to hard, we might fall out. Category:Blog posts